Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Date/Time:	Wednesday, 02 Oct 2013 at 8:00 pm
Location:	Great Hall, Memorial Union
Cost:	Free
Contact:
Phone:	515-294-9934
Channel:	Lecture Series
Categories:	Diversity Lectures Student activities
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Kwame Anthony Appiah, named one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 public intellectuals, is the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also the president of the PEN American Center, the world's oldest human rights organization. World Affairs Series and Technology, Globalization & Culture Series

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Born in London to a Ghanaian father and a white mother, Anthony Appiah was raised in Ghana and educated in England at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD in philosophy. As a scholar of African and African-American studies, he established himself as an intellectual with a broad reach. His book In My Father's House and his collaborations with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., including The Dictionary of Global Culture and Africana, are major works of African struggles for self-determination. His latest book is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism is a manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. Cosmopolitanism won the Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant prize given to a book on international affairs. How is it possible to consider the world a moral community when there is so much disagreement about the nature of morality? Anthony Appiah presents answers that are grounded in a new ethics which celebrates our common humanity, while at the same time offering a practical way to manage our differences. He offers a new approach to living a moral life in the modern age, where the competing claims of "a Clash of Civilizations" on one hand, and a groundless moral relativism on the other, can make such a project seem impossible.